Changed Boot Drive Letter From F To C - The System Does Not Boot At All
Jan 22, 2006
I bought a computer for my wife and kids. Well months go by and my wife tries to install something and notices that the MAIN drive is H: not C:
I figured that it was weird but no big deal. Well I purchased a printer for her and while trying to install the software it was giving me a "Windows - No Disk in Drive" error.
I did some research and spoke to HP tech support and they suggested that I search the web for a way to change the drive letters from H: (current hard drive) to C: (supposed to be default drive)
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Oct 8, 2008
I recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home.
I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do.
I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
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Jan 3, 2006
I have Windows XP Home Edition, SP2 on two separate bootable hard drives in my Dell XPS B1000r. I have my 80 GB �main� hard drive and a 40 GB �extra� hard drive. I mainly boot from my �main� 80 GB hard drive, and that�s the drive that won�t boot after I changed the drive letter.
I wanted to rename the Drive letters associated with each of these hard drives. I was able to change the �extra� hard drive using the Disk Management option. I was not able to change the letter of my �main� hard drive, because I booted from it. I used Regedit to change the boot drive letter, based on the Microsoft Help & Support article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;Q223188
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May 25, 2004
I installed a Serial ATA hard drive. Booted from floppy,partitioned and formatted 120mb HD,with 2 partitions.
Connected my old IDE drive and booted from Norton Ghostdisc, cloned my old drive to the new one. Removed all drives and USB card readers except the new SATA drive. Windows will not fully boot, it halts at the blue Windows intro screen. Restarted Windows, and scandisk ran, but indicated drive letter "H" not "C", so I guess the windows installation is still looking in the original place for it's files, ie. the "C" drive, that's why it won't boot. You cannot change the "System" drive letter from "Computer Management" within XP, and I cannot get into Windows anyway. Is there a "work around" for this, other than a clean install? Even then, is it still going to be drive "H"? And that means another Windows activation. How many goes do you get for activation? I tried a windows repair installation, and reactivation (wasted). Windows then worked, sort of. Lots of things were missing and programs unuseable,as they were looking for their files on "C": so I went back to square 1, put my old drive back in for the moment
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Oct 31, 2007
my old boot drive was g: .. i followed this guide here and changed it to c:upon restarting .. the system doesn't load up .. it gets stuck on the Welcome screen and that's it .. am i screwed?
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Oct 19, 2006
When XP Pro was functional I had 4 partitions on my 30 gig laptop drive in the following order as the appeared physically on the disk:
1: C: - a 2 gig dos partition for ancient non xp emulation compatible software
2: A linux partition for a common distro
3: the swap partition for the linux distro
4: E: - a 14 gig xp pro ntfs partition with my xp pro system files on it..
Now I believe my CD-ROM was using D: at this time for some reason or another... I don't quite remember for sure, but I am 100% positive that my system part was on E:
So I grab paragon partition manager and wipe the linux partition and merge it with the E: partition.. I must have really messed something up in the merge because it ended up changing my e: system part to d:. So now the system goes all the way through the first windows xp splash screen and hangs on the second one, after it loads the gui and before it provides the login prompt. I've set up a BartPE disk so that I could load the hkey_local_user hive to rename the mounted drives, but I must be doing something wrong because it saves the changes i make to the mounted drive d: to e: but it does not actually change the name of the mounted drive... it's still showing up as D:.. I have not tried a repair install because I assume it will not work due to the fact that it will detect the windows OS on d: and will probably just correct the OS and not any of the applications installed. Instead of attempting this I would rather blow away the part and start over from scratch which I will when I get tired of fooling with this.
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Dec 3, 2006
I was doing a new installation of XP home on a new hard drive, XP formatted the drive as F: and installed the boot sector there because a thumb drive was in the usb port (which it recognized as C:). I wasn't paying that close of attention and I didn't realize XP would see that thumb drive as C:. My question: is there any way to change the boot letter back to C: without reformatting the hard drive?
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Jul 25, 2005
how can i change the drive letter of my boot volume
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Nov 26, 2009
I have a dual boot system with both having windows xp.When I load into the 1st XP installation, the following is the list and assignment of the drives:
C : Local Disk (contains the 1st XP installation)
D : CD Drive
E : Local Disk (contains data and also few installed program folders)
F : Local Disk (contains the 2nd XP installation)
Initially when I noticed this drive arrangement after setting up the dual boot, I just left it as is, not knowing what to do.But nowadays I am having a lot of problems as the installed programs are not accessible because their target location keeps changing, everytime I keep switching between the two operating systems.How can I solve this problem?Can I do the follwing : Load into the 1st XP installation, and then change the drive letters (of the last three drives) such that they are matching the drive assignment as seen when loading into the 2nd XP installation.Here in a way I have kept the same drive name for both installations.But Will this work?I also have some of the program folders for the 1st xp installation stored in E drive, and after changing it to D drive, will all the links be properly converted upon restart?
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Jun 23, 2010
I reformatted a crappy gate way which has a recovery partition, but it would not reformat the rigth way, when i went to set up windows, Push the next button, i big white box went over everything and that was that, i reformatted 3 times and it kept doing it, so i got a winxp pro disk and did it this way, everything works geat, but now, that damn partition is taking my drive letter C, and i have already read the thing from microsoft about regedit, i did it and i could not load windows, it froze after Loadined winxp, mouse moved but nothing happend, i reformatted again... still taking my drive letter.. please help, if i have to reformat one more time, i wish for it to be the last, and my drive letters to be right.. HELP!! THANKS
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Sep 2, 2006
I have a Dell Pentium 4 computer that has it's C: drive changed to the drive letter F: which causes some problems for me. I would like to know how I can change it back to C: without reloading my OS.
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May 29, 2006
After reformating my pc, my secondary hard drive is now designated as drive "D". Before the reformat it was drive "G". I have software that needs to get data from drive "G" but the drive is not designated as "G" any longer. I can't remember how to reassign the drive letters so that I can designate the secondary drive as "G".
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Mar 21, 2010
I installed a new hard drive, the only drive, in my computer and installed XP pro. There was a card reader in the computer which was assigned c drive and the local drive was assigned h on the disk. I disconcected the card reader and changed the local disk to c from h in the registery. Now when I turn on the computer the blue screen introducing XP comes on and goes no farther.
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Sep 6, 2008
My external drive has always been "E" and I have several desktop shortcuts that relate. Recently I inserted a flash drive containing home movies and after viewing and a reboot later I noticed that my external drive is now shown as "New Volume F". I would like to change it back to "E"
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Sep 30, 2008
I was attempting to back up my hard drive to an external hard drive. The program (Norton Ghost 14) wasn't recognizing the drive. The Norton tech. helped me determine this was because under Disk Management there were no drive letters next to the drives. It showed a small partition on my primary drive, my primary drive, and my usb connected external hard drive, but none had drive letters next to them. I attempted to change their drive letters. It did something, but the letters still didn't show next to the drives. After this, everything disappeared on my desktop. I then rebooted and couldn't get to the login screen.Right now, when I start my computer I get the Dell bios revision screen, then the black MS Windows XP screen, and then the blue XP screen. Everything looks normal except that it stops short of the login area. My guess is that by changing the primary drive letter that my computer now cannot find anything because it appears the C drive is missing.
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Jan 6, 2009
I have an older Sony Viao desktop. Today I thought it would be a good idea to change the drive letters around in the Computer Managment utility that comes with Xp. So I have 3 physical drives, one of them is external, and I tryed to take the two Cd/dvd drives and move them to the bottom of my drive list by disableing them, then going to the Computer Management Utility, right clicking on my Local H drive, and selecting Change Drive Letter... Did that, then went back to the device manager, enabled my two cd/dvd roms, and everythign seemed to be in order... LOL! Until I restarted my computer. Now windows wont boot up. Wont boot from MY copy of Xp, and to top it off, the bios freezes as sson as I hit any key.
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Sep 14, 2005
I have an older Sony Viao desktop. Today I thought it would be a good idea to change the drive letters around in the Computer Managment utility that comes with Xp. So I have 3 physical drives, one of them is external, and I tryed to take the two Cd/dvd drives and move them to the bottom of my drive list by disableing them, then going to the Computer Management Utility, right clicking on my Local H drive, and selecting Change Drive Letter... Did that, then went back to the device manager, enabled my two cd/dvd roms, and everythign seemed to be in order..Now windows wont boot up. Wont boot from MY copy of Xp, and to top it off, the bios freezes as sson as I hit any key. So Im hoping someone can help me with this problem, because I have lots of important data on that machine that I need access to
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Mar 8, 2006
I have a dual boot system (2 hard drives) booting Suse and XP and boot up through Suse's built in boot manager which gives me the option of booting to Windows or Linux. But since I barely ever use Linux I want to delete it off the 2nd drive so I can use it for a storage drive, so I'm wondering how to replace the Windows Master Boot Record so I can just boot into my XP drive. I'm scared that once I delete/reformat the contents of the 2nd hard drive (I'll probably use Partition Magic to do this through my XP drive) that I won't be able to boot XP up anymore. So before I do anything I want to just be able to boot into XP and bypass the linux drive before I delete it to make sure everything is ok.
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Sep 19, 2007
I have an old HD From a system that I got rid of. I want to put it into a friends system to see if I can retrieve the files off of it and put it onto my external HD. The hard drive was the boot disk and the computer I am installing it on has it's own boot disk. If I boot up with two boot disks will there be a problem? Is there anything I need to take into account before doing this? I am planning on installing the old HD onto an ATA cable that I unplugged from the DVD drive. The HD that is in this system is not on an ATA cable, I'm not sure what it is connected to, just a small plug with a blue cable going to the mother board.
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Oct 21, 2009
What happened was recently my computer restarted out of nowhere when I was browsing the internet. When my computer restarted, it would not go past the windows loading screen and just reset (blue screen of death). I tried going into safe mode however, nothing seems to work other than booting Windows into 'debugging mode' and everything works fine.I'm trying to correct this problem by possibly using the Windows XP CD to repair Windows. Here's when I run into another problem. The Windows XP CD simply will not boot. I've tried changing the boot order in the bios but the 'press <any> key to boot from CD' will always be skipped no matter what. I've even tried different DVD/CD drives and different Windows XP CDs.
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Apr 21, 2009
I just upgraded my "guts" (mobo, ram, cpu) and am trying to get all set up. I installed windows XP on a brand new hard drive on a newly created partition. On the setup screen, it says C: Partition1 [NTFS] I left some unpartitioned space on the new drive for a later win xp 64bit version install and I also have another HD that is listed as D: Partition1. After the install, my system disk drive letter was F: and my other HD letter was E: I go to disk management and I can change my second HD letter but it won't let me change my system drive letter back to C:. How do I get my system drive letter back to C:?
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Nov 5, 2007
I have a HP ze5568cl laptop (Windows XP SP2). For a few years we've had trouble with the power connector. We've just wiggled the power cable to keep it connected and lived with the problem. It also gets very hot and the fan runs constantly. Yesterday when I powered it on there was no power, absolutely nothing. My husband has some electronic knowledge so we took the laptop apart and he soldered the loose part of the power connector. While he was doing that I cleaned the fan (couldn't believe how much dust was in there.When we plugged in the power cable the orange light came on so we were excited. When we powered it on all the keyboard lights lit up so we thought we had fixed the problem but.that's all it did. It went no further except that the fan kicked on.There is a clicking noise coming from the cd drive about every second with the green light flashing. I suppose it is checking to see if there is a bootable cd in the cd drive. I have attempted to change the boot order by holding F1, then F2 but it still continues to try to read the cd drive. I can't get to the screen that will allow me to change the boot order.
I also put the OS disk in the cd drive, hoping that it would start with the disk but it just clicks. Hubby removed the cover of the cd drive and I could see that the cd is spinning.There were no problems with this laptop prior to the power problem. It was really working very well especially considering the age of it.
The information in my sig is not for the computer with the problem. It's actually for an old computer which my son now has at college.
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Aug 30, 2008
I had a drive that was beginnning to squeal and i figured I could disable my drives one at a time to see which one was squealing. Of course, disabling the drives through the control panel doesn't actually keep them from spinning, so the whole thing was an exercise in boneheaded stupidity. Anyway, as soon as I disabled the c: drive the screen went blank (of course), and now when i try to reboot it complains about a non-system drive and asks me to insert a system disk. did I mention that this is a home-built system and it doesn't have a floppy, so i can't boot off the floppy? I tried booting off the XP install CD, but it won't except that either (this seems odd to me).
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May 11, 2010
Before my latest power supply, when my computer booted, it would show the Welcome screen, then play the boot-up sound, then load the desktop. Now there is no boot sound cue until after the desktop loads. Is this something to be concerned about?
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Sep 5, 2005
I've a neighbor down the hall using Win 2000. It will not boot. It shows a message as follows: CPU is unworkable or has been changed. Please recheck Soft Menu. I can get to the Soft Menu but any change results in the same message. I'm sorry that I don't have more information about the configuration of the PC.
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Oct 9, 2005
800 MHz processor PC with 256MB RAM and a WD hard drive. She runs Windows XP Professional on it. She walked away from her computer for awhile, and when she came back there was a black screen on it saying basically that it couldn't find any of the devices that are actually attached to the computer i.e. hard drive, CD-ROM. It also said boot record not found. So I decided to have her try the Windows Recovery Console to try and help fix the boot.ini file. Well, when she typed in the command, it didn't work and said invalid entry or system drive not found.
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Apr 3, 2007
I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode. I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma that I'm having. My old drive an IDE 100GB IBM primary drive was partitioned into 3 parts:
c: 30GB FAT32 primary
d: 30GB FAT32 "
e: 30gb FAT32 "
All ran great in XP's on c: ,D: and :e except that i was running out of room in all the partitions and the drive is getting very old , I think (5yrs). I used XXClone Pro v.0.58.0 to clone my old c: and d: partitions to a WD IDE 160GB. I tried many other cloning proggys like Acronis True Image, Drive Clone, Paragon Drive Copy, Drive Image 2002, HDClone 3.1 Pro but they all either changed my new drive NTFS file system to FAT32 or made exact same size copies. I formatted and partitioned my new drive as follows:..............
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Mar 31, 2010
I had voltage fluctuations last night due a snowstorm and the voltage dropped crashing my PC.It now won't boot and gives the error that a file is corrupted.Windows/system32/config..The PC runs an OEM XP home edition on a SATA drive, the PC also has an IDE drive (D) but the OSes are on the C drive.Inside the XP installation I have Linux Mint installed.When I boot I get the 2 options I always used to , XP (default) and Linux Mint.XP won't boot when selected and gives the error above.The Linux Mint, also on C and in fact installed as a program within XP, will boot, hence I believe the SATA drive to be undamaged.I can see the C drive and all the XP files from the Linux installation.I've tried using the original full CD and the recovery console but when the recovery console opens all it can see is the IDE drive which it labels D (and of course doesn't contain the original XP install.I can't remember how I got XP on the SATA drive in the first place, I don't appear to have any Hard drive drivers in the case I keep all software CDs in and I'm a bit flummoxed. I can only imagine I just fitted it and loaded the XP install disc but that's at odds with what seems to be happening now.Spent a large part of today Googling but can't find anything that will fix this. so far.I don't want to have to wipe and re-install everything unless there's no option, it's a fast way to kill a couple of days over the holidays.
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Jun 10, 2007
first i get the HP blue screen. I tried F1, but i dont see my hard drive in the boot menu. I followed some steps in Hp's web site- took the cpu apart and unplugged both hard drives from the motherboard, plugged them back in. when i restarted ,i got the HP screen and then windows started to load up. After a few seconds the HP screen came back up and then the black screen: sk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter. I also noticed that pressing F10 for system recovery does nothing.
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Aug 18, 2007
I changed the BOOT.INI section of msconfig to boot windows in Safemode. Upon getting in Safemode, the computer finally recognized USB devices and the CD drive again (wasn't doing so in normal mode). So, I insert a Windows XP disc, used the Advanced install mode (the one that overwrites the previous installation of Windows), and everything seemed to be going great.
However, the machine restarts and tells me this "Windows XP Setup cannot run under Safemode. Setup will restart now." and has an OK button. I click it, thinking it's going to boot into normal mode. Well, it doesn't. It boots up again, says the same thing.I click OK.Restart.Again.OK.On and on into infinity.
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Oct 24, 2009
I accidentally deleted a partition and later found out that my system is dead....The only way I recover out of that is I reinstall Windows and then install grub again to recover the Linux partition. But I feel the delete partition is a very rapid process just taking seconds and in that I don't think files would be deleted, so I feel potentially I can recover the deleted partitions including the boot partition. But I don't know how to do it. Also now when the boot partition is deleted and the system is not booting up what should be done to recover the system and data?
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